Background information
Origin	Sheffield, England
Genre(s)	Indie rock Indie pop
Years active	2004–present
Label(s)	Rough Trade
Website	http://www.thelongblondes.co.uk/
Members
Kate Jackson Dorian Cox Reenie Hollis Emma Chaplin Screech Louder

The Long Blondes are a 5-piece English indie rock band from Sheffield. The band is known not just for their music, but also their "glamorous punk" image. Front-woman Kate Jackson was featured in The Guardian's style section and the NME cool list, moving from 39 in 2005 to 7 in 2006. When questioned about her place in the first NME list by The Guardian, Jackson remarked "Probably because they didn't have enough girls. It was so overrun with boring boys, they needed someone to bring a touch of glamour."

Band members

• Dorian Cox - Lead guitar and keyboards.
• Reenie Hollis - Bass guitar and backing vocals
• Emma Chaplin - Rhythm guitar, Keyboards and backing vocals
• Kate Jackson - Lead vocals
• Screech Louder (real name Mark Turvey) - Drums

Style

The Long Blondes' songs reflect a number of influences, including 60's pop, Buzzcocks, The Ramones, post-punk and New Wave. Traces of work by another Sheffield band, Pulp can also be seen in their recordings, their debut album was indeed produced by Steve Mackey, bassist of Pulp. The prominence of these various influences varies from song to song. Jackson's vocals have been compared to Ari Up of The Slits, Deborah Harry of Blondie and those of Au Pairs. Dorian Cox's backing vocals are also very similar to those of Jarvis Cocker. The music features angular guitars and prominent bass guitar lines. However, the band themselves claim somewhat more eclectic influences than their sound suggests, citing Burt Bacharach, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Chinn and Chapman, and Stock, Aitken and Waterman as influences. The band gained notoriety early on in their career for their bold proclamation "We do not listen to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors or Bob Dylan. We chose an instrument each and learnt to play it." This quote was first published on their website, and was seen as a comment on the derivative nature of the contemporary music scene.

Career

On April 13, 2006 they signed to Rough Trade Records[1] and recorded their long-awaited debut album, Someone to Drive You Home over the summer ready for its release on November 6. They worked with producer Steve Mackey on the album, who has previously worked with Pulp. The album was preceded by their second single for the label, "Once and Never Again", which was released on October 23rd and debuted at number 30 in the UK singles chart[2]. In June 2006 they released their first single for the label, "Weekend Without Makeup", which reached number 28. They appeared at a number of UK festivals over summer 2006, including the Carling Weekend, Leicester's Summer Sundae and Ireland's Electric Picnic. In 2007, they performed live at the Radar live festival in Istanbul on July 2.

Discography

Studio albums